This week artificial intelligence (AI)-driven energy storage services provider Stem said that it had formed a partnership with New York-based private equity company Syncarpha Capital to build 28.2 megawatt-hours (MWh) of large-scale storage projects co-sited with solar in Massachusetts.

Last week, Sunrun announced that its bid to supply 20 MW of residential solar + storage capacity into the New England ISO Forward Capacity Market for 2022-2023 was approved. According to Chris Rauscher, Director of Policy and Storage Market Strategy for Sunrun, this is not a pilot project or an experiment in any way.

In the race for the next generation battery, lithium-ion technology has made huge leaps in recent years. But the power packs continue to have drawbacks: they use raw material mined in unstable countries, they’re dangerous if they break and they could pack more power.

Energy storage has become an everyday element of grid planning and energy network management – driven by technology advances, proven benefits, and steadily falling prices. As storage goes mainstream, it’s no longer unusual to see deployments in the tens of MWh. Although about 95 percent of operational storage in the U.S. is in the form of pumped hydro, which can store massive amounts of energy cheaply for days, virtually all of the remaining storage resources are lithium-ion batteries.

The adoption of renewable energy is expected to increase across the U.S. Projections from the federal Energy Information Administration indicate that from 2020 to 2050 utility-scale wind capacity will grow by 20 gigawatts (GW) and utility-scale solar photovoltaic capacity will grow by 127 GW.

The expected spread of electric vehicles (EVs) has led stakeholders to look at them not only as a burden for the grid but also as a resource, according to the concept of vehicle-to-grid (V2G). Electric vehicles can act as a mobile storage device and provide support to a grid based on intermittent and distributed energy resources (DER) but what is the basic requirement to enable an EV as a resource for the grid rather than a burden?

The objective of PtG technology is to enable the balance of supply and demand for power in electricity networks with renewable energy. Importantly, as the use of renewable energy continues to grow there will be an ever-increasing need to support ramping and smoothing of renewables and to enable storage of the over-production via transfer of PtG on an as-needed basis.

If the energy industry learned anything in 2017, it was that energy systems are highly vulnerable to damage from hurricanes, wild fires and other natural disasters and work should be done to make the world’s electric grids much more resilient.

Rajit Gadh of the Smart Grid Energy Research Center breaks down the sectors involved in vehicle-to-grid technology, identifying the path to widespread adoption for V2G and the resulting benefits to the power grid.

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